“I know.”

“-San Francisco, where he stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The conference lasted a week. Pendleton never came back.”

“What do the police have to say?”

“Haven’t talked to them.”

“Isn’t that sort of SOP in a missing-person case?”

Graham grinned a grin custom-made to hack Neal off. “Who said he was missing?”

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t. I said he didn’t come back. There’s a difference. We know where he is. He just won’t come home.”

All right, Neal thought, I’ll play.

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why won’t he come home?”

“I’m pleased to see that you’re asking some better questions, son.”

“So answer it.”

“He’s got himself a China doll.”

“By which you mean,” Neal asked, “that he’s in the company of an Oriental lady of hired affections?”

“A China doll.”

“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”

“Another good question.”

Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.

“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”

He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.

“Damp in here,” Graham said.

Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.

Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”

He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”